Ask E. Jean: My Boyfriend Read My Text Messages Behind My Back

Dear E. Jean: Right now I'm at a resort with my boyfriend, and he decided to invade my privacy and read the text messages on my phone while I was at breakfast. He totally misconstrued what he read and called me a "whore," a "hustler," a "real piece of work," and a "fake" to my face. What should I do, other than never talk to him again? —Blindsided

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Blind, my blossom: When a lady discovers that a gentleman has read her private messages, it is perfectly correct for the lady to repeatedly kick the gentleman in his blackberries until he crashes to the pavement and undergoes a brain switch with Heidi Montag's Razr. But wait. Let us examine the dilemma from the opposite angle. Here are a few highlights from letters I've received in the past week:

Dear E. Jean: One day my emotions got the best of me, and I read his text messages on his phone. There was a message from a woman saying she wanted to have sex with him "again"! He was upset about this invasion of privacy, and said he could never trust me.—In Love With a Manipulator

Dear E. Jean: I looked at his texts and saw he had invited her to his place at 4 a.m. I was so mad and frustrated that I ended up going through all his text messages. He was flirt-texting with four different girls in the past month.—So Lost

Dear E. Jean: He went to the restroom, leaving his iPhone and notebook on the table. I was bored sitting there alone so I started leafing through his notebook and I found some sort of love poetry "dedicated" to me. He writes something about me every day, and I also found my complete cell phone roster!—Freaked Out!

As you see, the letter from Freaked Out! contains the always exciting, but lethal, Two-Way Snoop. Looking at people's private messages, letters, notebooks, etc., is wrong. That said, a woman who keeps suspect messages on her phone is a moron.Because here's the fact: Every single person reading this sentence—even you, lovely Miss Blindsided—has looked at something, at some time that you shouldn't have. It is human nature. We want to know what we're not being told. So get a Gmail account only you know about. Delete your texts. Kill your IMs. Don't leave your phone and laptop around. We live in a world where our government can listen to our phone conversations, our companies can read the e-mail we type on company computers, and our police can watch us on hidden cameras as we walk down the street. Hide your private things away like you are smuggling drugs across the border.

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